Data enabled mobile devices, such as smartphones, have become widely adopted, and applications and data requirements for such data enabled mobile devices have increased. As multimedia and data rich applications have become more prevalent, increased data throughput to and from a data enabled mobile device is needed. In response, newer wireless networks contemplate data throughput rates. For example, in a Long Term Evolution-Advanced (LTE-A) system, peak target data rates are 1 Gbps and 500 Mbps for downlink and uplink respectively. To achieve such target data rates, one potential approach is to use carrier aggregation techniques that utilize bandwidth aggregation of a variety of different arrangements of component carriers (CCs), including the same or different bandwidths, adjacent or non-adjacent CCs in the same frequency band or different frequency bands.
For efficient carrier aggregation, signalling overhead should be minimized. For example, in current long term evolution (LTE) systems, a user equipment (UE) may be configured to transmit hybrid automatic repeat request (HARQ) acknowledgements (ACK) on a physical uplink control channel (PUCCH) format 3.
However, the channel state information (CSI) is also transmitted on a PUCCH format 3 and the periodic CSI may be dropped if HARQ and the periodic CSI happen to be transmitted in the same subframe. The repeated dropping of the CSI may lead to a degradation of downlink throughput since the evolved Node B (eNB) scheduler cannot receive correct CSI reporting from a UE and may not be able to choose a suitable modulation and coding scheme for the transmission. Further, eNB may receive more HARQ-negative acknowledgement (NACK) feedbacks due to the CSI dropping.